O, to bring back the great Homeric time,The simple manners and the deeds sublime:When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight. Mortimer CollinsLetter to the Rt. Hon. B. Disraeli, M. P. Pub. anon. 1869. Ploughing his lonely furrow. Used by Lord Rosebery. July, 1901.

Listen to the Water-Mill: Through the live-long dayHow the clicking of its wheel Wears the hours away!Languidly the Autumn wind Stirs the forest leaves,From the field the reapers sing Binding up their sheaves:And a proverb haunts my mind As a spell is cast,The mill cannot grind With the water that is past. Sarah DoudneyLesson of the Water-Mill.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth. Charles KingsleyLife. Vol. II. Ch. XXVIII.

O there are Voices of the Past, Links of a broken chain,Wings that can bear me back to Times Which cannot come again;Yet God forbid that I should lose The echoes that remain! Adelaide A. ProcterVoices of the Past.

I need not ask thee if that hand, now calmed, Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled,For thou wert dead, and buried and embalmed, Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled:Antiquity appears to have begunLong after that primeval race was run. Horace SmithAddress to the Mummy in Belzonis Exhibition.

That awful independent on to-morrow!Whose work is done; who triumphs in the past;Whose yesterdays look backward with a smileNor, like the Parthian, wound him as they fly. YoungNight Thoughts. Night II. L. 322.